[Alexis Soloski’s article about David Henry Hwang’s 1993
comedy Face Value, the second installment in the “Unopened”
series, which the paper dubbed “The curious history of shows aimed for Broadway that never got to
opening night,” appeared in the print edition of the New York Times “Arts” section on 2 November 2020. The online version of the story, called “David
Henry Hwang’s ‘M. Butterfly’ Followup: ‘M. Turkey,’” was posted on 1 November 2020.
[The articles in this series are not connected—except for the fact that they’re each about a play that failed to open on Broadway—but it’s interesting to compare the circumstances of the plays under examination. If readers are interested in keeping up and haven’t read the previous entry in the series, I suggest going back to 26 February and reading “‘Unopened’: Lone Star Love.”]
by Alexis Soloski
The goal: a comedy about mistaken racial identity inspired by protests over “Miss Saigon.” The result: a backstage farce that never got to opening night.
David Henry Hwang’s “Face Value” arrived on Broadway on March 9, 1993. It left five days later. For Gina Torres [b. 1969], an actress in that production, the news came as a relief. “Because we were pushing that stone uphill for a good long time,” she said.
“Face Value,” Hwang’s follow-up to the Tony Award-winning “M. Butterfly,” was a farce — and not entirely in the ways that Hwang [b. 1957] and Jerry Zaks [b. 1946], the play’s director, intended.
In 1990, Hwang, the first Asian-American to win a playwriting Tony, joined members of Actor’s Equity in objecting to the casting of Jonathan Pryce [Welsh actor, b. 1947] as a Eurasian character in the Broadway production of “Miss Saigon.” Equity rejected the casting.
When the producer Cameron Mackintosh [b. 1946] canceled the production, the union reversed the rejection, stipulating that Pryce could perform provided Asian-American actors were sought as replacements and that Pryce no longer used eye prosthetics or skin darkening bronzer as he had in London.
Hwang took the loss as only a playwright can. He went to work on “Face Value,” a comedy of mistaken racial anxiety that modeled on the farces of Michael Frayn [British dramatist, b. 1933] and Joe Orton [British dramatist, 1933-67]. It centers on a new musical, “The Real Fu Manchu,” and the pair of Asian-American actors, Randall and Linda, who plan to protest it on opening night at the Imperialist Theater.
“Fu Manchu” has cast a white actor in the title role and it includes a big number called “He’s Inscrutable,” so there’s a lot to protest. “It’s racist, sexist, imperialist, misogynist — and I didn’t even get an audition,” Randall complains.
Set largely backstage, “Face Value” crammed in yellowface, whiteface, gun play, Pirandellian asides, crisscrossing sexual complications and various people hiding in closets.
“I remember finishing the first draft and feeling well, this is going to need a lot of development,” Hwang recalled this summer.
But the producer Stuart Ostrow signed on immediately. Other producers, including Scott Rudin, soon followed. Zaks assembled a tiptop cast — Mark Linn-Baker [b. 1954] as the white actor playing Fu Manchu; Jane Krakowski [b. 1968] as a dithery actress; a then-unknown Torres as a put-upon stage manager; Mia Korf [b. 1965] as Linda. (BD Wong [b. 1960], who had won a Tony for “M. Butterfly,” later joined as Randall.)
Two million dollars were raised. Rehearsals began.
“It all came together probably too quickly,” Hwang said. “I was hubristic. I felt like, ‘Oh, I can fix it in four weeks, and then an out-of-town tryout in Boston.’ And I couldn’t.”
Torres remembers the first night of the Boston tryout. “Nobody laughed,” she said.
Frantic rewriting began, with new lines, new cuts, new scenes arriving nearly every day. “We might have cut intermission at one point,” Torres said, “like we’re going to hit them fast and furious and not give a chance to leave.”
It was an exhausting process — physically, emotionally. The play opened on Valentine’s Day to reviews that were less than loving. Hwang recalls one that ran with the headline “M. Turkey.”
But “M. Butterfly” also hadn’t done especially well out-of-town. So the producers made a decision to move forward. Torres remembered the excitement of walking by the Cort Theater and seeing her name on the posters. “We thought: ‘Oh, now we’re in New York. We can turn this around because New York has a more diverse audience. They’re waiting for us,’” she said.
Hwang began another round of revisions. Decades on, he couldn’t recall exactly what changed. “I’ve probably blocked a lot of that,” he said. But a New York Times article reported a new beginning and a new ending.
Somehow these made the play worse. The Boston script, Hwang said, at least had a certain singleness of purpose. The New York one, rewritten in desperation, did not. And it wasn’t any funnier.
Torres thinks that has more to do with content than with comedy. “It really made you look at the absurdity of color and how we perceive it in human beings, which is I believe, ultimately what killed us,” she said. She often wonders how it would play today.
“Face Value” shuttered after eight previews, with the producers, in a Times article, citing “a lack of box-office interest.” The actors moved on. Torres finally made her Broadway debut a year later with the barely longer lived “The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public.” (“What it ain’t got is fun,” the Times critic wrote.)
It would take another decade for a Broadway show to close during previews, the Farrah Fawcett-starring [actress, principally film and television, 1947-2009; aka: Farrah Fawcett-Majors] “Bobbi Boland.”
Hwang moved on, too. “I can compartmentalize pretty well,” he said. But the idea of mistaken racial identity continued to nag at it him. He revisited it years later in the Obie-winning “Yellow Face,” a semi-autobiographical comedy that also took on the “Miss Saigon” controversy as well as newer strains of anti-Asian racism.
In “Yellow Face,” a character known as DHH mounts a Broadway play called “Face Value.” It flops in this fiction, too.
That real-life debacle bruised Hwang’s ego and deflated his boy wonder reputation. It didn’t keep him away from Broadway. He has had five further shows there, plus a 2017 “M. Butterfly” revival.
“Having a play close in previews on Broadway would generally be considered one of the worst things that can happen to your career, and it is, but I survived it,” he said.
“The worst thing happened to me,” he added. “And I’m still here.”
[The première of Hwang’s M. Butterfly started previews at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on 13 March 1988 and opened on 20 March. It ran for nine previews and 777 regular performances, closing on 27 January 1990. The production, directed by John Dexter and starring John Lithgow and BD Wong, won 1988 Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Featured Actor in a Play (Wong) and Best Direction of a Play (Dexter), and was nominated for four other Tonys.
[The production also won 1988 Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding New Play, Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play (Wong), and Outstanding Director of a Play (Dexter), and the Theatre World Award for Wong. Hwang was nominated for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
[The play was revived on Broadway in 2017 under the direction of Julie Taymor. Starring Clive Owen and Jin Ha, the revival ran 61 performances.
[The Broadway première of Claude-Michel Schönberg; Alain Boublil; and Richard Maltby, Jr.’s musical Miss Saigon opened at the Broadway Theatre on 11 April 1991, having started previews on 23 March. It ran for 19 previews and 4,092 regular performances, closing on 28 January 2001. The production was staged by Nicholas Hytner and Bob Avian did the musical staging.
[The principal performers in New York City and London were Lea Salonga and Jonathan Pryce. The Broadway production won three performance Tony Awards (Best Actor in a Musical – Pryce; Best Actress in a Musical – Salonga; Best Featured Actor in a Musical – Hinton Battle), four Drama Desk Awards, and a Theatre World Award. There was a Broadway revival of Miss Saigon in 2017-18.
[Hwang’s Face Value began previews at Broadway’s Cort Theatre on 9 March 1993 and ran for eight preview performances, closing on 14 March. Directed by Jerry Zaks, it was scheduled to open on 21 March.
[Bobbi Boland by Nancy Hasty premièred Off-Broadway at the Arclight Theatre (on the Upper West Side of Manhattan) on 1 March; it ran to 10 July 2001 with staging by Evan Bergman; playwright Hasty played the title role.
[A Broadway production directed by David Esbjornson, scheduled to open 24 November 2003 with Farrah Fawcett in the lead, opened for previews at the Cort Theatre on 4 November and closed on 9 November after 7 performances. The producer stated that “the play simply does not work in a Broadway house,” according to the New York Times.
[Yellow Face premièred at the Joseph Papp Public Theater’s Martinson Hall on 10 December 2007 after starting previews on 19 November. It ran until 13 January 2008 under the direction of Leigh Silverman. With Hoon Lee and Noah Bean as the leads, Yellow Face won an Obie Award in Playwriting for Hwang; he earned his third Pulitzer Prize nomination for Drama for the play.
[In the play, which is semi-autobiographical, Hoon Lee played a fictional character called DHH, which stands for “David Henry Hwang.” Francis Jue (whom I saw in Cambodian Rock Band, see my report on 14 March 2020) played HYH, a fictionalized stand-in for Henry Yuan Hwang, the playwright’s father.
[Next in “Unopened” (4 March): “Bernstein, Robbins,
Sondheim and . . . Brecht? Almost, but
not quite.”]
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